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In the last few weeks I have heard several comments that have left me a little worried. The worry that keeps popping into my head is what appears to be a pattern of relatively well-informed and apparently compassionate people surrendering to oppression in the mistaken belief that it is inevitable.
The first comment made to be me was by a privately-educated university-graduate in their late 20s, who I know to be socially progressive whilst economically liberal. During a conversation about the recent US election they suggested to me that in light of the push to the far right in the US election, perhaps the UK would have been better off voting for the likes of Farage in the UK elections in order to quell the ire that they argued would likely be focussed on the UK Labour government in the months to come. Rationally speaking this isn’t a particularly controversial position to take. There is a degree of surface level logic to it.
However, it was at this point that I began to think about the early decades of the 20th Century, and specifically how this sort of pre-emptive surrendering to oppression is not unprecedented. This tendency of otherwise sensible and caring people to acquiesce to fascism if it is introduced in stages is evident during both the growth of European fascism in the early 20th Century and throughout the US population since the republic was first established.
Time and time again, in both Europe and the USA, large sections of society willingly surrendered their own political agency by seemingly imperceptible degrees until one day they found themselves facing the threat or the reality of an unabashedly fascist government.
Before going on I think it is worth pointing out that I am not the sort of person that cries fascist whenever I can’t think of what else to say. In the two decades I have spent researching political history a large proportion of that time involved studying the psychology of individuals, groups and societies. The fact is that in the three decades following WWII one of the most focussed upon aspects of psychological research was the question of how do “civilised” societies allow themselves to slip into this type of organised oppression and systematic violence?
While the conclusions from these studies weren’t very reassuring, there were some positives one can take from them. Once one understands how this type of fascistic behaviour and world view can come about and recognise in oneself our own risks of falling foul of such thinking it isn’t difficult to see the early warning signs of psychopaths and their sociopathic minions trying to lead us towards it. But it is never enough to just recognise it, we have to stand up to it. Being anti-fascist doesn’t mean you have to don a balaclava and take up arms, but it does mean you have to call out the incremental steps towards it when you see it if you want to avoid being forced to put the balaclava on later.
The person that started me down this train of thought has always shown themselves to be well informed and willing to think critically rather than just accept what they are being told by others. Which is why it is important to contextualise their thinking in terms of the social spheres of influence in which they move. After all we are all highly influenced by external messages and messengers.
Because of the nature of this persons education, from fee-paying school to leading university, their peer group tends to be over-representative of the more “cerebral” and high-status jobs such as parliamentary assistants and broadsheet journalists. The circles they move in includes a number of highly informed and arguably critically aware people who have a large degree of influence and power over the wider society. If the idea that that my acquaintance is currently wrestling with, whether surrendering to oppression might avoid the worst of it, is common amongst their peer group then that bodes ill for all of us.
A few days later I bumped into one of my neighbours in the street. They are a non-college-educated retiree in their 70s, who owns and shares their flat with their largely bed-ridden partner. When I bump into this person on the street they are often reading The Telegraph. On this occasion, during the usual complaining about the weather and local teenagers they mentioned that they had joined the Reform Party and was volunteering to help get the local party up and running. This person is a full-time carer for their partner who is entirely reliant on the NHS for maintaining their health. I bring this up because it strikes me as an interesting lack of foresight, and potentially yet another example of this “surrendering to oppression”.
In its 2024 manifesto, in relation to the National Health Service the Reform party pledged to give a 20% tax relief on private healthcare and insurance, 0% base rate tax on all NHS and social care staff and manage the NHS on the basis of “pharmacy first, GP second, A&E last”. In summary, tax relief for private companies and privately employed social care staff, and a redirecting of budgets from the government owned GPs and A&Es to the overwhelmingly privately owned pharmacies. This is a text book example of redistributing wealth from the working class as tax payers to the owners of private companies through the shifting of provision from the public sector to the private sector. Or to give it its more recognisable name Privatisation.
These policies would be a significant acceleration towards the US model. Which for anyone who is planning on needing healthcare at some point in the future ought to really be looking at the US model before voting for it in the UK. Study after study shows the USA healthcare system failing everyone except the owners of the private companies involved in it. In comparison to most other wealthy countries, not least of all the UK today, the USA model is one of the most expensive to run with the worst health outcomes. This is not a national health care service, so much as a way for taking money from the population and handing it over to the owners of corporations.
To choose to vote for the privatisation of the government service on which the lives of you and your loved ones are relying upon baffles me. I can only see three ways that this sort of self-destructive behaviour could come about. Either a lack of understanding of the implications of ones actions, or a lack of care for oneself and others over the likely outcomes, or a belief that there is an inevitability to it and if one can be seen to be surrendering early on they will be in some way protected from it. Put simply, I don’t know, or I don’t care, or I do know but I’m hoping complicity will protect me.
In terms of the first possible reason, if we are being honest it is not entirely impossible to imagine. We all know people who have little or no knowledge of history and/or don’t spend a huge amount of time thinking critically about the behaviour and proclamations of others. That is not a value judgement of them. Quite the reverse, it is an observable systemic problem with our education system in the UK.
According to the OECD, and reported by the Big Issue nearly 1 in 5 adults in England have low literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving skills. Which not only has a profound effect on the “economy” it has an equally significant influence on the “democracy”. If 20% of the electorate struggle to discern opinion from fact, they will find it difficult to evaluate election pledges in the context of the demonstrable honesty and motivations of those making them, and compare and contrast those pledges to similar policies in a wider historical and/or geographical context, and from which construct an informed response to those pledges.
And as for the second reason, well that is a little easier. Some people are simply sociopaths.
While I’m not happy about either of the first two reasons I do understand how they come about. It’s the third reason that really bothers me. There is absolutely no common sense rationale or academically demonstrable logic to explain it. A desire to concentrate wealth and power into ever fewer hands can only end one way, and that is with all of the power and wealth in one persons hands. When we are surrendering to oppression as if it were an inevitability, this is the very future that we are bringing about.
Authoritarians, dictators, fascists, robber barons, oligarchs and capitalists all want the same thing, to have no equal threatening their power or wealth. Trump and Musk will end up trying to take each other out, their every action and proclamation is signposting that eventuality. Trying to hide in one of their shadows can do little more than delay the time when they turn on you. Farage is the same.
Over the years I have written several essays on Fascism in Spain in the early 20th century and the illusion of democracy in the UK electoral process. This position I’m taking here isn’t particularly controversial in an historical context. My grandparents generation knew first hand what this sort of surrendering to oppression leads to. They learnt it from their parents and grandparents, and they from theirs in turn. And it was only with an eye on the past that the generations that preceded us were able to struggle against it.
In 1944 FDR’s vice president Henry Wallace wrote an article for the New York Times about the rise of fascism both in general, and more specifically in relation to the USA. In that article he described a fascist as someone “whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends”. The same was applicable to those marching alongside Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. It really doesn’t require much to see the similarities once again in Farage, Le Pen, Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Musk, Bezos, Murdoch, Zuckerberg and so many countless others today.
While you might be told that it is inevitable or unstoppable it is not. History shows us that it can be stopped. But it does need to be called out whenever it occurs. Surrendering to oppression when we have the strength to stand up to it, is failing in our responsibility to those who don’t have the strength. Not standing up to those people who have combined their lust for money and power with hatred and intolerance for anyone who doesn’t look, sound, love or pray like them is the first step to the destruction of our families, friends, communities and eventually ourselves. Oppression is not inevitable, it is surrendered to incrementally.